It only took me…oh, about…I dunno…forever to get SlopeFillers on SSL, but if you’re reading this you may notice a lock icon in your browser’s address bar that wasn’t there yesterday.

It’s one of those things I was a bit of a laggard on and then, with a handful of domains to secure, took me even longer to make my way down the list and get my beloved SlopeFillers in line with the direction sites need to go, companies like Google are pushing for us to go, and a place many sites have already gone.

Speaking of which, I was curious what that number was for resort websites.

Behind, the Answer
So, true to form, I wrote a script to find out and ran 300 random resort websites through it.

Now, there are a handful of ways to find an answer to this question, but after a few false starts with various methods I settled on this: check to see if there was a valid SSL certificate setup for each resort’s domain. That said, Keep in mind:

• Just having a certificate does not mean their site is pushing people to https instead of http
• Some resorts will redirect to https but have http in their site and, therefore, not get that beloved lock icon to show up in a browser address bar

Once I ran it through the script, I manually audited a good portion of those 300 (including all those flagged as “no ssl”) and the results were really solid. Perfect? Hard to say. Pretty dang close? Definitely. Here’s how things shook out.

Long story short, only about 1 out of every 9 resort websites isn’t available via https.

Why?
This was a pleasant surprise. I honestly thought the number would be much lower.

I think this is thank in large part to so many smaller ski areas using things like Squarespace that comes with SSL baked right in for no extra charge.

Regardless, it’s great to see so many resorts using something that browsers and tech giants alike are rewarding if adopted and penalizing if not.

About Gregg & SlopeFillers
I've had more first-time visitors lately, so adding a quick "about" section. I started SlopeFillers in 2010 with the simple goal of sharing great resort marketing strategies. Today I run marketing for resort ecommerce and CRM provider Inntopia, my home mountain is the lovely Nordic Valley, and my favorite marketing campaign remains the Ski Utah TV show that sold me on skiing as a kid in the 90s.